ABSTRACT
This chapter is an interpretation of the concept of scarcity as it emerges from the eighteenth-century writings of Adam Smith, David Hume, and, as critique, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Smith's language in his Lectures on Jurisprudence is one that employs concepts of need and desire. Smith argues that the human being is not content with what is given in nature for the satisfaction of needs, since the human being is governed in part by taste. Hume's theory is one which analyzes the dynamic of social needs and integrates it into a broader theory of progress. The scarcity experienced in commercial society is thus seen as necessary and is accordingly treated positively as a given. The same can be said for Smith's perspective. Rousseau's theory, in contrast, is a critical theory of social scarcity generated from the perspective of someone who is simultaneously pulled and repelled by the social dynamic under investigation.
